Center for a New American Security

Yes, Carlos has been absent these last few...yeesh, that long, huh?

Well, he got buried under grading assignments, and taking advising Master's students, and a few other things. But mostly, he's been tweaking his new toy.

(Of course, you'd think that would have given Carlos greater connectivity and time on the 'net, and you'd be right. He's just not been hanging out at the AM section of cyberspace).

So, how do decompress after all that work? Road trip, baby! Carlos will be giving a talk on terrorism and the internet just a few hours away from Tampa, Florida. (He's typing this draft in the airport lounge right now, though the wireless network seems a bit wonky, it might not get posted until after. Shall he see if the expense account will pass a Super Bowl ticket? Let's not, but let's dream).

On “Terrorism and the Internet,” Carlos had been tempted to pull the “terrorists use the internet for exactly what everyone does—to find cheap airline tickets and free porn.” But no, he likes these occasional trips, so he'll keep the wise-assery to a minimum. Though really, the idea that the use of the internet is something special for terrorists should have gone out with acid wash denim. Terrorists want to pass information secretly. They need to send lots of information quickly. They want to pass both open messages and closed ones, and they need to do so with relative anonymity. If geeks and Al Gore hadn't invented the internet, terrorists would have had to.

(One of Carlos' favorite cartoons remains the “classic” 1993 New Yorker cartoon. This is truer on most dating sites, but holds as a general rule).

In terms of passing funding and information, Carlos had thought about being a little circumspect here, but this is more out than not, and might be of interest to readers here.

For moving lots of data, virtual drives/web storage are obviously great. Connecting them to torrent sites is even better. Most torrent sites (think Napster for more than music for you somewhat old-school folks) are all about copyright violations (movies, programs, music, you name it), but there's a ton of other stuff out there, buried but relatively easily to find. Carlos first came across torrents when he was looking for a PDF of the classic Marine Corps Gazette publication The Guerrilla and How to Fight Him. His search pointed him to a massive file of guerrilla warfare publications. While many were classical historical type texts, there were a few “how-to” pubs included as well.

(The scariest thing about the torrent world isn't even, sadly, the copious copyright violations, but a fair amount of what looks to be child porn, and no, I'm not even going to joke about that. But with most of these sites and servers outside the US, I'm not sure what can be done there).

Moving money? Lots of non-tech ways to go, but how about ways that aren't connected to cash at all? The site Second Life is where people can create “avatars” of who they, well, want to be and lead “second lives.”(We'll leave the social commentary aside for now). “Enhancements” on the basic avatar, as well as things like property and other possessions, can be bought in Second Earth, with real funds transferred to Second Life banks. (The largest bank recently had a run and had to shut down when people were taking money out of Second Life to buy things for, um, real life). The point being of course is that one can deposit money into Second Life and have it withdrawn from someone, somewhere else.

What this all is, bottom line, is another manifestation of the “better mousetrap, better mouse” syndrome. Or its lesser-known but no less powerful variation: Just because you made it for something, doesn't mean it won't get used for something else. Case in point: Carlos' Christmas present linked above. The models for these ultra-mobile PCs were for the whole “One Laptop per Child” campaign intending to “link the world” (a whole Tom Friedman wet dream), and while they still are working in that area, the main market for “netbooks” today are techno-geeks like yours truly.

A good friend of Kip's had this to say about the Bateman response to the NY Times article on graybeards being used, tsk tsk, for information operations. An interesting civilian perspective on the whole thing (reprinted with his permission)--Kip is still more inclined to agree with Bateman on this one (mostly because he doesn't really understand "myopic expediency").

The whole point of the NYT article, as I read it, was the access, regurgitation, further access, while simultaneously using those very connections to further financial self-interest. If true, this, in my opinion, was damning mostly for the individual analysts involved, and more broadly the system complicit in it (i.e., the news networks negligently turning a blind eye and the military knowingly exploiting it).

The example of the general who was 'cut off' seemed relevant only in this regard. While acknowledging that this is 'legit', he [Bateman] normalizes it by analogizing to lawyers and doctors on the air (which is a problem in its own right), but doesn't give any weight to the idea that lawyers and doctors aren't speaking to the most fundamental aspects of self-governance in our society.

Aside from this relativity perspective, he also wipes away all agency on the part of the analysts by asking how they were 'supposed to know about the journalism ethics?' The point, as I see it, is how could they be so blind to the basic ethical dilemma of conflicts of interest, specifically and especially when the stakes are so high and their words carry the weight of every soldier wearing the uniform before them? Furthermore, the entirety of his piece washes the hands of the military clean through historical examples. In my opinion, history repeated is not a logically valid argument for ethical behavior.

That being said, I have sympathy with the idea that institutions and organizations, like any living thing, tend to follow the objective facts of history: fly where you can eat. The short-term perspective of running a war efficiently, including on the home front, forgives the officials reasoning to use whatever means necessary, even if this means exploiting an inherently corrupted system. That, however, is the very reason that institutions and organizations need policies to avoid the long-term detriments of myopic expediency.

Furthermore, I think it would have been worth mentioning similar actions from this particular administration including the planted 'journalists', the bought and paid for editorial writers, the prepackaged 'news' clips, the attempt at creating a propaganda office, etc. (especially if you're going to take a jayson blair shot).

Here is Dr Irack's post from yesterday on the same topic.

And we really do suck at propaganda.

For those who read about information operations in Afghanistan on this blog and who read yesterday's post on how ISAF's only response to accusations of resupplying the Taliban was to say "not our helicopter," you will not be surprised to learn that, well, it actually was ISAF's helicopter.

"On March 25, a private helicopter company was contracted, on behalf of an ISAF unit, to resupply an Afghan National Police (ANP) outpost located in a remote mountain area" of Zabul provine, an ISAF statement said.

"Unfortunately, due to a human error in transcribing the latitude and longitude of the location, the load was dropped in another remote area," it added.

ISAF, now not just "I Suck At Fighting," but ISAFPCWP&RAGPS, "I Suck at Fighting, Planning, Campaign Writing, Propaganda, and reading a (frieking) GPS."

(and I'm talking as a whole--all of the individual contingents (well, except the Germans who are there for four month rotations to protect the force, not accomplish the mission) deserve praise for bravery at the battalion level and below)

Kip has been following this story for some time in the Afghan news and was waiting for a wire or someone to break it on this side of the ocean to share it with you.

If you want to know just how inept ISAF is at information operations, supposedly one of only four things ISAF says it does, then read on.

Now, on first glance, the whole story seems rather ridiculous. It goes like this.

Somebody, NATO says it wasn't them, went to re-supply a police checkpoint via helicopter. They sling-loaded a couple of boxes of guns and dropped them off at the checkpoint. Except they dropped them off at the wrong checkpoint, according to Afghanistan's head of the National Directorate of Security (aka KGB) , and the Taliban got them.

A number of Afghan legislators now claim that this was a purposeful resupply of the Taliban by the Coalition.

Now, if you are scratching your head at this point, you can probably be excused, as it all sounds a little weird. Cerainly ISAF's public affairs officer seems to be scratching his.

(and the fact that the Associated Press went to a US public affairs officer at Bagram as part of the seperate "US-led Coalition" shows just how little the US itself has played into the whole ISAF thing since the public affairs officer at Bagram is part of a US unit that is theoretically subordinate to ISAF, not part of the US-based advisor Coalition which is commanded from Kabul and not within ISAF; if you take ISAF seriously, it is kind of like going to a battalion commander's public affairs officer to find out why the brigade commander did something)

But reports of Coalition resupply to the Taliban have been somewhat regular in the Afghan press since at least 2006. So, why on earth would Afghans believe something so silly?

Well, the answer as I could best discern from my time with Afghans goes something like this. The Afghan people witnessed the Taliban absolutely vanquished by the world's only superpower in only a couple of months--this after another superpower had been bled out and defeated in Afghanistan's mountains. The Taliban, at least for most Afghans, were entirely wiped out. If they have come back, Afghans reason, it could only be because the Americans and others have let them. Why does NATO want the Taliban to stick around? The answer to this is sometimes a little harder to draw out but is generally built around NATO wanting to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely and needing the Taliban to do it.

This is all, of course, balderdash. But it is balderdash of the important sort as, while not supporting the Taliban's narrative necessarily, it makes NATO seem to be hellbent on thwarting Afghans' desires for peace and stability. This is what happens when you fail to "manage information and expectations."

Not only did I hear from civilians who found these supposed midnight rescues of the Taliban to be believable, but I also spoke with many Afghan Security Forces including the National Directorate of Security found them somewhat credible.

And the best ISAF can muster up in response to an Afghan Parliamentarian claiming that they re-supplied the Taliban in what seems to have been a real case of the Taliban being (accidentally) supplied by a helicopter is "wasn't our helicopter"?

Come on now. Perhaps a name change from ISAF, reputedly standing for, "I Suck At Fighting" to ISAP, "I Suck At Propaganda" is now in order.

Sara Corbett has written an impressive article in this week's NY Times Magazine on how cell phones are transforming the world.

Some of the highlights. First, the US Army may have thought it was being suave using anthropologists. Apparently, anthropology is no longer the job most likely to having you working permanently in academia or at McDonalds.

This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia’s researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner’s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they’re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

Note too that apparently Nokia has adopted other Army patterns such as death by Power Point.

Now, for the really important stuff. Apologies for quoting so much of the article, but Corbett has simply done a phenomenal job of highlighting some very important trends. I'll let her speak to them and then add my own thoughts.

Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries. As more and more countries abandon government-run telecom systems, offering cellular network licenses to the highest-bidding private investors and without the burden of navigating pre-established bureaucratic chains, new towers are going up at a furious pace. Unlike fixed-line phone networks, which are expensive to build and maintain and require customers to have both a permanent address and the ability to pay a monthly bill, or personal computers, which are not just costly but demand literacy as well, the cellphone is more egalitarian, at least to a point...

Part of I.D.E.’s work included setting up farm cooperatives in Nepal, where farmers would bring their vegetables to a local person with a mobile phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales agent, using the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable sale...

Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone...

In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge....

For this reason, the cellphone has become a darling of the microfinance movement. After Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel-winning founder of Grameen Bank, began making microloans to women in poor countries so that they could buy revenue-producing assets like cows and goats, he was approached by a Bangladeshi expat living in the U.S. named Iqbal Quadir. Quadir posed a simple question to Yunus — If a woman can invest in a cow, why can’t she invest in a phone? — that led to the 1996 creation of Grameen Phone Ltd. and has since started the careers of more than 250,000 “phone ladies” in Bangladesh, which is considered one of the world’s poorest countries. Women use microcredit to buy specially designed cellphone kits costing about $150, each equipped with a long-lasting battery. They then set up shop as their village phone operator, charging a small commission for people to make and receive calls...

The endeavor has not only revolutionized communications in Bangladesh but also has proved to be wildly profitable: Grameen Phone is now Bangladesh’s largest telecom provider, with annual revenues of about $1 billion. Similar village-phone programs have sprung up in Rwanda, Uganda, Cameroon and Indonesia, among other places....

During a 2006 field study in Uganda, Chipchase and his colleagues stumbled upon an innovative use of the shared village phone, a practice called sente. Ugandans are using prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money from place to place, something that’s especially important to those who do not use banks. Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission. “It’s a rather ingenious practice,” Chipchase says, “an example of grass-roots innovation, in which people create new uses for technology based on need.”...

Hammond of the World Resources Institute predicts that mobile banking will bring huge numbers of previously excluded people into the formal economy quickly, simply because the latent demand for such services is so great, especially among the rural poor....

[Hammond] “They give their produce to the guy who runs a vegetable stall, and they go home. How do they get paid? They get paid the next time they come to town, which could be a month or two later. You have to hope you can find the stall guy again and that he remembers what he sold. But what if you could get paid the next day on your mobile phone? Would you care what that mobile costs? I don’t think so.”...

In February of last year, when Vodafone rolled out its M-Pesa mobile-banking program in Kenya, it aimed to add 200,000 new customers in the first year but got them within a month. One year later, M-Pesa has 1.6 million subscribers, and Vodafone is now set to open mobile-banking enterprises in a number of other countries, including Tanzania and India. “Look, microfinance is great; Yunus deserves his sainthood,” Hammond says. “But after 30 years, there are only 90 million microfinance customers. I’m predicting that mobile-phone banking will add a billion banking customers to the system in five years. That’s how big it is.”...

At current rates of migration, the United Nations Human Settlements Program has projected that one-quarter of the earth’s population will live in so-called slums by the year 2020. Slums, by sheer virtue of the numbers, are going to start mattering more and more, Chipchase postulated. In the name of preparing Nokia for this shift, he, Jung and Tulusan, along with a small group of others, spent several weeks in various shantytowns — in Mumbai, in Rio, in western China and now here in Ghana....

Nokia has started producing phones with multiple address books for as many as seven users per phone. To enhance the phone’s usefulness to illiterate customers, the company has designed software that cues users with icons in addition to words. The biggest question remains one of price: Nokia’s entry-level phones run about $45; Vodafone offers models that are closer to $25; and in a move that generated headlines around the world, the Indian manufacturer Spice Limited recently announced plans to sell a $20 “people’s phone.”...

Motorola now provides free solar-powered charging kiosks to female entrepreneurs in Uganda, who use them to sell airtime. The company is also testing wind- and solar-powered base stations in Namibia, which could bring down the cost of connecting remote areas to cellular networks. “Originally mobile-phone companies weren’t interested in power because it’s not their business,” Banks says. “But if a few hundred million people could buy their phones once they had it, they’re suddenly interested in power.”...

Now, Kip has discussed the importance of cell phones regularly (here, here, here, here, here, and here).

(If you're interested, Kip first became fascinated with the technology in the wake of the French Muslim riots of 2005 as French youth used cell phones to instigate swarming tactics on the police)

The US military is way behind the power curve when it comes to cell phones. Last year, when a young officer in Afghanistan's CSTC-A advocated in a memorandum that eventually reached the National Security Council the use of cell phones to pay the Afghan National Police as well as to conduct some reporting by the Police, the idea was shot down as infeasible. The recommendation came out the same time that M-Pesa established a cellular funds transfer network throughout Kenya (M-Pesa is now running a network for microfinance transfers in Afghanistan as well-proving that it was never infeasible).

Cell phones mark both the culmination and the departure point of the information age. Increasingly the world will be connected not by people's physical location but by their location on a vast information network--already half the world is connected this way. To understand just how transformational this has been (and to steal from NPR's Car Talk) just ask yourself how crazy it would have sounded to ask somebody on the phone twenty years ago, "Where are you?" and how normal it sounds today.

Identities are paradoxically becoming more fluid and more fixed as we can network with people with like interests across vast spaces while maintaining bonds of family, clan, tribe, and ethnicity that once required both a physical and a psychological presence.

Wars for a number of reasons that I'll discuss in my next reading club post will be fought among the people (and another day I'll talk about why I hate the word counterinsurgency even while being a proponent of its "practice"). As the theater of war is determined by how people communicate as much as their physical location, it becomes increasingly important that the military expands its understanding of information and communication beyond situational awareness of soldiers' physical location on the battlefield.

Canada's Globe and Mail has this week released a report on the Taliban entitled "Talking to the Taliban" in which its Kandahar correspondent Graeme Smith interprets interviews of an Afghan who he has hired as a "researcher" (based on the description in the story, "source" would likely be a better term).

The 42 interviews conducted with self-professed and Kalashnikov-wielding Afghan Taliban fighters are a must watch for any counterinsurgent in Afghanistan. These videos give us a window into the average Afghan guerrilla fighter, the men who emerge as a result of underlying causes and whose individual deaths will not resolve the conflict. These are the men that in some combination we will have to convince, cajole, capture, or kill (and compromise with) if we are to win in Afghanistan.

The most important thing to emerge is an idea of the Taliban's narrative which focuses for the most part on foreign occupation, which identifies Karzai and Musharraf as "slaves," and which underplays the role of money or opium in the motivations of the fighters. The propaganda also focuses on the importance of ordinary Afghans in supporting the fighters rather than external support. The interviews also identify subtly some areas of discomfort and disagreement, particularly as applied to the question of poppy and the Durrand line. I will personally spend a lot of time replaying them all myself as I believe it is important to understand not only the fighters but also their message (they know they're playing to an audience when the camera is rolling).

The interviews themselves are fascinating. A few of the graphics and maps are quite useful, including the tribal map of Panja-ve (Kandahar-bound or -present USMC, see Appendix B, 3-24; use accordingly--do not then write "SECRET//NO FORN"). That said, much of the reporting by Graeme Smith in the accompanying videos is unsophisticated to say the least. My main beef is that the he is using a worthy in its own right but admittedly unscientific survey to make sweeping conclusions.

For instance, in his final piece discussing suicide bombing he says, that we are "seeing a shift in the Taliban movement" away from past debates on the practice and toward widespread acceptance. Yet not only is the poll unscientific but the fighters are being watched in most cases by their comrades or minders and would be unlikely to digress from a pre-approved plan, even if they felt otherwise.

And while I agree that the Nurzai and Ishaqzai make up a substantial portion of the insurgency, the video is only coming from places where his researcher can get access and therefore are more likely to come from a small group of tribes among whom the researcher can travel. I should also point out that a number of Ghilzai tribes (as well as tribes outside of the Ghilzai/Durrani branches) are more pro-government than pro-insurgency, even as his diagram identifies all Ghilzai as insurgents.

Because the Taliban could not point to Canada on a map or identify who Stephen Harper is, Smith felt them unsophisticated. I believe (and I am really not taking a cheap shot at Canada here-you all deserve hugs) that most of the world could not identify Stephen Harper's job if asked. Moreover, I bet that an interview of Canadians would find them as clueless as to the Nuristani-speaking areas of Afghanistan as the self-identified fighters are to the French- speaking areas of Canada. Several identified the fact that the US and Canada were neighbors, which is probably better than most Canadians could do if asked to identify the neighboring countries of Afghanistan.

Smith's broader point in this is that the Taliban pose no danger to Canadian shores even if they win. These fighters are not part of a global jihad in Smith's opinion because they profess no allegiance to it. This is to mistake the foot soldiers for their leaders. One need only read Al Qaeda's propaganda of the last month to know that it would pursue global jihad from within Afghanistan and Canada would be a target--heck, just look at Mullah Dadullah Lang's second-to-last interview to see that. He seemed to have a pretty decent grasp of geography.

And, lest we forget, it is from Afghanistan that a true salafist jihadi movement of not only global aspirations but also global reach emerged.

How can we still have it so wrong!

Today (thank you Danger Room for posting this important article) the Army moved its entire Reimer Digital Library containing doctrinal publications behind a password protected firewall. The documents that we accessible in the library to you, Joe Public, were unclassified documents approved for public release.
This means they could be shared with our allies, other services, and, yes, snoopy reporters who could ask why much of our doctrine still looks poised to defeat a non-existent Soviet threat (and, Kip's sure someone will scream, the enemy--trust Kip on this one, the already knows our tactics because he actually SHARES information and ADAPTS, unlike us).

Oh, by the way, updating the Army Knowledge Online password requires a Combined Access Card (CAC) reader. Otherwise, after 100 days, the password goes bad. Hey, you pencil-pounding, never been outside the TOC, sack of...ok, you get my point...guy who made this decision. Kip and his crew didn't have access to a CAC reader for most of his deployment, and yes, he did need stuff from the Reimer library to share with Coalition partners and Afghans (and for himself, thank you).

Many of these documents, by the way, are too big to email. So when Kip wants to share something important with, say, his Norwegian partner in Afghanistan, he can now no longer do so.

Great move. Let's now classify everything in the Reimer Digital Library with a no foreign eyes caveat so that it becomes f*!@*ng impossible to use.

Kip needs to be done with leave soon, or he will really wish he didn't have this much time to read...